Prototyping Custom Optics for Illumination Applications

At Luximprint, we offer ‘manufacturing-as-a-service’ for fabrication of custom optics. Our printed parts find their way in a broad range of illumination engineering and design applications and enable users to quickly trial and error with custom optics solutions until the best solution has been defined.

The Conventional Way: Subtractive Processing

In the old days, optics has been manufactured by settled methods, such as diamond turning, injection molding, and machining, just to name a few. Any of them concerns subtractive processes, whereby a material is taken away from a larger build block to get to the desired shape. No matter this concerns the direct end part, or the tooling needed to fabricate it. Along with that, significant investments in time and money need to be done to get to the final part.

Alternatively, standard optics can be sourced from the shelf fast, easily and generally also cheap, but they may not fit for purpose. To get around it, there is no choice but choosing custom optics solutions with the costly commitments involved.

21st Century Optics Manufacture

Nowadays, the digitization of optics manufacture has started. It enables custom optics to be built in an ‘additive manner’, whereby the material in exact volumes is added to a given design or substrate. In fact, optics can now directly be generated from a CAD file, with zero need for manufacturing tooling.

The added value of additive optics fabrication is most significant in the early stages and novel product development. The speed, design freedom, and ease of creating design variations/iterations is unparalleled.

Rather than offering ‘just another’ mass-fabrication method, Luximprint’s sole and only focus is on taking out the ‘pain-points’ from conventional fabrication processes, rather than disrupting them.